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Twenty-three minutes into our interview last week, Jason Ricci was talking about The Misfits' "I Turned Into a Martian," which his blues-fueled band Jason Ricci & New Blood covers on its April release Done with the Devil.

"It's a song about demonic possession, which is a subject I relate to and have some experience with directly," said Ricci, who will be performing on Sunday at Blueport Junction.

So far, we've touched on Ricci's drug addiction (crack, alcohol, barbiturates, and more), his recovery (he's 11 years sober), and his year in jail for a drug-related strong-arm robbery. Prior to his incarceration in 1998, he said, because of his drug problems "I could no longer perform. ... Nobody wanted to hire me. I was very grandiose at the time. I thought it was because people were afraid I was going to blow them off the stage. But the real reason was something much more mundane, like I just smelled really bad."

I took his reference to demonic possession as a metaphor. We moved on.

Eleven minutes later, I followed up.

"I mean it literally," he said. "I believe in demons. I believe in angels. And I believe in anything that people have believed in enough to impregnate it with the energy it needs to be capable of existing. I believe that the psychological and spiritual mind overlap, and we are capable of willing into existence entities, elementals, gods, demons, angels, whatever. Bigfoot. You name it. Ghosts. Whatever. I believe that perception is key, that reality is subjective, and that those two things can become one and the same."

He thinks people can physically conjure Bigfoot? "It's possible we can will Bigfoot into existence," he said. "Literally."

On June 25, Alison Hart -- an aide to U.S. Senator Tom Harkin -- addressed health-care-reform issues in an open discussion with members of the public at Trinity at Terrace Park. Hart briefly spoke about current House and Senate legislation and then opened the floor for questions and comments regarding the current and future state of our nation's health care system.

Some people call them "deserters," while others choose the nobler-sounding words "war resisters." The term you use almost certainly betrays how you feel.

But the issue is more complicated than it was 40 years ago. The political climate in Canada has changed since the Vietnam war, and American soldiers who move to Canada today are in legal limbo - and appear increasingly likely to be deported. And with no draft now, those who serve in the United States military volunteered; a decision to renege on that commitment strikes many people as cowardly.